I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, for 25 years and extensively written about it for the last five years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing scholarship have included The Huffington Post, Salon, and Film Threat. Follow me at @ScottMendelson.

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A 'Phantom Menace' Solution For Shorter Movie Trailers

The Hollywood Reporter, uh, reported on Monday that the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) was doubling-down on polite suggestions that they made last June regarding in-theater film marketing. The big “suggestions” are again that the maximum length of a film trailer to be 2 minutes and that there be no in-theater advertising (posters, cut-outs, etc.) for a film four months prior to release and no in-theater trailers before five months out from release date. While the rules would again be voluntary, studios are allegedly concerned that theaters might not play trailers or put up advertising that violated said guidelines. I won’t rehash what I wrote about this back in June. Instead I’ll offer one possible answer for the current trend of 20+ minutes of spoiler-filled trailers preceding each feature film in a theater. It is what I call “the Phantom Menace solution”.

If you’re among those who saw 20th Century Fox'sFox'sStar Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace in a first-run movie theater back in May of 1999, you probably remember a most unusual batch of theatrical trailers. Pretty much every studio wanted their trailers for their big summer films playing in front of what indeed turned out to be one of the biggest movies of all time. But Lucasfilm demanded no more than 5 minutes of pre-show trailers. So the studios basically cut what amounted to “mini trailers” for their biggest upcoming films. Instead of the usual 2-2.5 minute trailers, we got lightning fast 30-45 second spots for the would-be big films of summer 1999. It was basically Super Bowl Sunday in a movie theater, but with all of the teasers at once preceding the “big game”.

We got a moody teaser for Walt Disney'sWalt Disney'sTarzan which was a basically an invisible artist drawing the title character while his grim origins were recounted (“I said he could stay. That doesn’t make him my son.”). We got a variation on the Super Bowl teaser for New Line Cinema’s Austin Power: The Spy Who Shagged Me that openly admitted its proverbial status as the second-biggest movie of the summer (“If you see one movie this summer, see Star Wars! But if you see two movies…”). Other mini-teasers included Warner Bros.’ Wild West, Sony'sSony'sBig Daddy, and Paramount’s The General’s Daughter. But the most unique offering was from Fox itself, which basically cut a few 3-1 trailer reels, which each highlighted three upcoming releases in well under the length of a single traditional trailer. The respective films were Fight Club, Anna and the King, The Beach, and TitanTitan A.E.

This 3-in-1 teaser is frankly something I have never seen before or since. In fact, the whole “parade of short teasers” gimmick has yet to be mandated again, even for the last two Star Wars prequels or such surefire mega-hits like The Dark Knight Rises. Not a single one of those films from 1999 and 2000, the hits (Austin Powers 2) and the flops (Titan A.E., which ironically teased over a year in advance of its summer 2000 release) suffered from having to alter their marketing in order for the privilege of advertising before Star Wars. It was and is possible to successfully advertise your major movie in smaller doses, even in what amounts to a theatrical trailer. Yes all of the above films had regular trailers that were released before and/or after their shorted Star Wars teasers, but it stands to reason that more people saw those shortened trailers in front of The Phantom Menace than saw the longer trailers in front of movies that didn’t gross $431 million in the summer of 1999.

Everybody arguably won out. The studios got to plug their films in front of The Phantom Menace, audiences didn’t have to sit through 15-25 minutes of trailers, and the films being advertised were relatively unspoiled by virtue of their mini-teasers. Now just because a teaser is short doesn’t mean it can’t spoil the movie, as last year’s Fast & Furious 6 “give away the climax” Super Bowl ad demonstrates. And there are certainly more complicated films that need more than thirty-seconds to adequately explain their plot. Although even Inception‘s much-copied trailerfalls victim to the classic “nothing but spoilers in the third act” trap, successfully explaining the film in the first 70 seconds but adding a 50 second montage of visual spoilers. Very few films need those full 2.5 minutes to make the sell. The end result of the copious and lengthy trailers is to do little more than just give away more and more of the film purely out of needing new footage to show.

A cut down in time, both in the pre-release time frame in which to advertise as well as the length of theatrical trailers, could solve both problems as well as arguably saving overall money in marketing costs. Now even a universal acceptance of said guidelines won’t stop online marketing efforts from appearing whenever studios desire, and we could very well see a situation where a theatrical trailer ends with a “see the whole trailer online!” blurb similar to the extended Avengers Super Bowl teaser in 2012. But there is a large percentage of the movie-going populace, the ones that like movies but don’t obsessively read movie sites for the newest news or trailers, that both doesn’t want to sit through 20 minutes of trailers and don’t want those trailers to spoil the film before they even have a chance to avert their eyes in the theaters.

A situation similar to what took place over the first few weekends of Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace could easily solve both problems. 15 summers ago, Warner Bros., Disney, and the other major studios all proved they could successfully sell their films via bite-sized portions, mere months before release, without compromising their financial outcomes. The only question is whether or not movie goers really want what they claim they want. Would you want fewer trailers, shorter in length and dropped sooner instead of farther away from the release date, especially for the films you were already planning on seeing? Is the trailer package specifically tailored for the first Star Wars prequel something that could work on a regular basis, or was it just a one-time event for a somewhat unique motion picture event? Please sound off below, both on NATO’s new guidelines and on film trailers in general.

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